


Immaterial Girl

by KittyViolet



Series: Kitty told me to name this series [2]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-14 13:23:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10537371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Something's wrong with the weather, and Kitty can't get back to sleep.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Part 1 of (probably) 5. Takes place between Uncanny X-Men #167 (“Professor Xavier is a Jerk!”) and Uncanny X-Men #185 (Storm de-powered). Kitty is definitely not a New Mutant; Magik certainly is.

Usually it’s Illyana who wakes late at night, or suddenly, or wakes up sad: she’s been through so much, so much more than Kitty can know, even now. And usually it’s Kitty who ends up holding her best friend’s hand, or rubbing her shoulder, or sitting beside her shortly after sunrise on her bed in the third floor room they share. It’s a shared room—one of several, now that the New Mutants have moved in—and it has just enough privacy, given the old school’s thick walls, that the teens can feel comfortable sharing almost anything. Usually it’s Illyana with something to share.

Not tonight, though; there’s a wicked storm, something ungovernable that shakes the dormer window before it goes boom, and Kitty wakes up first. She’s shaking too: her curly hair is a chaos across her shoulders, strands caught in the straps of the off-white camisole in which she sleeps, and she sits up wondering what happened, and to whom, and why she’s so unsettled: she who used to tell Illyana stories long ago when Illyana was little, she who’s the reasonable one, the listener, who has felt for so much of her life like everyone’s reliable—though irascible— best friend, or else like a kid sister, or else like tech support. 

Life in a school for mutants, the X-life she lives, is a life of persistent emergencies: when there’s not a cosmic crisis there’s a psychological one, or a magical disaster, and Kitty has so often felt—when she wasn’t too young to take part—a kind of righteous indignation. She was the sane one, the funny one, the one who wouldn’t flip out, even if she got scared.

And now she feels stuck, shaky, limitlessly apprehensive: there is something cosmically wrong with whatever is in the weather outside, a black-and-white ash that sticks to the glass like shredded newspapers, and rustles like static in storms. 

Where’s Lockheed? Her dragon doesn’t always sleep with her, but he’s usually there, perched over the newel post in a way that has to be comfortable only for dragons—no cat, and no Kitty, would sleep up there. But there’s no Lockheed there: apparently he’s out patrolling, or else pretending to ride one of Logan’s motorcycles (he’s been known to sleep on the handlebars).

Kitty rolls her curls out of her eyes and puts one foot on a floorboard. There’s no way she’ll sleep. She’ll have to wake up her best friend. If the menace is supernatural, then Magik might know what to do.

If it’s not, if it’s just Kitty worrying about what Kitty tries not to worry about—where do her feelings come from, where should they go? what’s her future with this band of grownups, and why does she feel like a kid but not a kid?— if Kitty is just projecting her own mixed feelings onto this anomalous, gloom-laden weather, well, then, a few words, and a few hugs, from her best friend will be the best available remedy.

So maybe she’ll wake up Illyana. But not yet; her friend is still sleeping, one fine, metallic blond hair over her cheek, a few more between her lips. (Do all girls with long straight hair eat their hair in their sleep?) What’s going on outside? It’s just loud sleet; it’s just pollution; it’s probably nothing; it’s weather-related, so Storm will notice if it’s serious and handle it after sunrise—she’s handled far worse weather before.

Kitty watches Illyana breathe, watches her eyelids flicker, watches her cheek, faint and pink.

That weather is creepy. Kitty can’t get back to sleep on her own But she can do what she’s done before, do what Illyana has said she’s welcome to do whenever she’s cold or lonely or especially insecure: she can walk a few inches (phasing, gently, so as not to crack or creak floorboards) and then get back under the covers, in bed with her friend, and spoon her, wrap her arms around the Russian teen’s shoulders, and try to get back to sleep.

The results are not quite what Katherine Pryde intended: she pulls the quilt by one corner, makes a space for herself in her friend’s bed, and feels—it’s reassuring; it’s exciting—her friend’s straight hair beside her own. But now--- it’s embarrassing, and it’s happened before— she can’t quite get herself entirely solid. The side panel on her camisole, which phases—like all her clothes—along with Kitty’s body, flickers and waves through Illyana’s elbow, then settles back by Kitty’s hip as she shifts herself and tries to settle down.

She watches her toes—slightly calloused, from all that dancing—as they turn back to their ordinary density, then sets them right beside Illyana’s bright red polished toenails; their feet, she thinks, fit together perfectly, at least when they’re lying down together, when it’s mostly dark.

But Kitty still can’t quite get back to sleep. She puts one of her own hands on her ribs—no, it’s one of Illyana’s hands: when she’s just phased she can get very confused about which parts of her body are hers. Illyana keeps her hand on Kitty’s ribs, under her camisole, and she turns slowly over: she’s not going anywhere.

The Russian girl opens her eyes.

“Something’s up with the weather,” Kitty explains. “I got scared. Are we OK?”

Illyana’s fierce green eyes light up, stronger than sunrise, first sensing for supernatural danger, and then—having sensed none—looking back in Kitty’s brown eyes. Then their lips meet, once, twice. Kitty looks surprised, and then pleased, and then very pleased. 

Where is Illyana’s hand now? Is it over Kitty’s ribs again? Is it where her bra would be, if she slept in a bra? (Kitty’s used to wearing a bra, by now, but she doesn’t sleep in one.) Are they holding each other closer, breast to still-new breast, before Kitty turns around again, becoming the outside spoon?

Are those clicking sounds at the windowpane? or beeps, or scrapes, or warning lights outside? But they seem very distant. Kitty and Magik are safe, now, here.

“We are very OK,” Illyana says, and smiles, and says “hrmrmrphrmrph,” and then closes her eyes. Wrapped around Illyana’s strength, with her left hand lazily entangled in the top sheet, Kitty drifts back into sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not weather. Is it magic? is it for Magik to fight?

When they wake up together it’s sudden, and it would be alarming if the X-Men hadn’t seen so many worse alarms. Sunlight hits through a bay window, but the air outside the window is freckled and black, and the wind sounds less like wind than like the grinding rock album Roberto was playing last week. (Did he like it? Kitty liked it, sort of. It could get old fast, though.) 

Whatever precipitation started last night—whatever black rain or sand or grit or burnt scraps would float through the night air—now it was much worse, falling with ardor, transmitting malevolent fear.

Rather than throwing on civilian clothes, Illyana and Kitty both rush to put on their yellow and black X-uniforms and zip down the right-angled stairs. 

“It’s over the tri-state area,” Storm is saying, “and it’s a menace, not just to humans but to the weather itself. All the clouds try to rise up and flee.” (That’s Storm—emphatic, but poetic; she’s used to being obeyed, and to being quoted, and she doesn’t want to be misunderstood.) 

“This morning I rose high enough to see the entire pattern,” she continues. “I wanted to reshape it if I could: I could not even move it around—I felt as if something horrid had descended on Earth’s atmosphere, something that did not belong, that was not weather at all.”

Illyana believes she knows what to do. “There’s something horrid out there,” she exclaims, facing a startled Ororo and an even more startled Logan, Kurt, Dani, and Peter—“and it’s unnatural, creepy, comes from nowhere—I think I can take it down.”

And there she goes—brave and determined, a girl whom nothing can scare—with her soulsword. She must have convinced herself that whatever is falling on Westchester County (and on Manhattan, and on the Bronx, and wherever else it falls) was indeed magic in origin; if that’s the case her soulsword can kill it, or neutralize it, or send it back to wherever it belongs.

Illyana rushes into the gray, searing not-rain, the tarnished rippling atmosphere of the not-world. Does it remind her of Limbo? Is it easier to take, or less mysterious, because it’s probably not directed at her? She’s so brave—Kitty thinks—it could be directed at her after all, it could be a plot from a magical entity…

Dani and Kitty and the rest watch the front door slam shut, with Illyana outside. It’s a thick door, and would be even if it weren’t reinforced with various rare steels; only Logan can hear and see what’s outside, and he winces—he’s about to rush out himself when Illyana comes back in, looking only lightly burnt. She’s sheathing her soulsword. It’s done no good.

“Whatever’s out there isn’t magical,” she admits. Nightcrawler rushes over to her with a towel; Kitty wishes that she could have been there first. So does Peter, who’s already by the door, looking around, looking down. Kitty sometimes feels odd—torn, guilty, unsure—when she sees Illyana and Peter in peril together. A bit of that odd feeling’s happening now.

Then the feeling goes away; there are more urgent concerns, like saving the world, if the world needs saving, from the apparently wholly un-eldritch black snow/rain/bits of something that have made Illyana’s hair, face and hands look as if she had lost a fight with burnt toast.

“It’s not magical,” she says, “because I couldn’t fight it with my sword. But it’s something wrong. It could be very bad. When it hit me I felt—“ She pauses. “Numb. Gross. Like I was all wrong inside. I wanted to run away, but also to stay there and let it hit me.” Illyana walks towards Storm, who conjures up a bit of cleansing mist.

Kitty frowns and scowls and starts to walk towards her friend. Then she stops: the analytical, urgent-problem-solving subroutine in her is taking over. If it’s not magic, then what? How many people without Illyana’s inner resources have been caught and paralyzed, or far worse, by this bleak non-rain?

Nightcrawler turns up the kitchen radio with his tail. “Schools are cancelled through Westchester County, in Manhattan, the Bronx and Nassau County,” the radio says. “Nonessential state, city and country employees are asked to stay home until further notice… The Henry Hudson Parkway… The Hudson Line… The Harlem Line…” 

Cancellations, and worse; an ambulance drove off the Cross-Bronx. Route 187 is an unholy mess. Emergency lines report that some people are calling and simply weeping if they’ve been out too long in the rain. It’s like a big helping of snow day, Kitty thinks, except with a side order of terrifying psychoactive effects—and no magic. Who or what could it be? Everybody in this room has had some experience with mind control, with emotional manipulation, from the truly evil and sadistic to the subtle and questionable—and after all, Professor Xavier is both a telepath and a jerk—but this isn’t a Danger Room scenario nor a way for him to test his team: this is a real emergency (with Xavier, as often, away in space doing Shi’ar stuff). How to respond?

“Wolverine,” Storm says. “What can you tell us about how the rain smells, what it’s made of, where it’s been?”

For once—it’s too early in the morning, maybe?—he has neither a beer nor a cigar. “Nothin’, babe,” he says. “I can’t slash it, I can’t punch it, and I can barely smell it. It ain’t animal, and it ain’t vegetable neither.”

“I can wait no longer,” Storm says, and she rushes out the door, tight black cloak trailing, and rises into the grim rain of knives that has replaced the air. She grimaces, but she rises—there’s a glow around her like St. Elmo’s fire; she protects herself, in these situations, with a sheath of lightning. We can see lightning flash at treetop level, and then Ororo soars back down.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Those aren't raindrops.

Kitty—that’s me—Illyana, Kurt and Logan: we’re all standing in the shelter of the reinforced porch of the X-Mansion, looking out, like normal teens and normal adults waiting out a normal rainstorm, or maybe a normal, non-super-science, non-villainous, non-magical flash flood.

Storm lands, through the rain that obscures her descent, deliberately, cape flaring, slowing her flight before her boots touch soil.

“I have good news of a sort,” Ororo says. “Whatever is coming is coming for Salem Center; the material is still falling here, but it’s falling less densely, less dangerously, to the south and east.”

“Zeroing in, nicht wahr?” says Kurt.

“Of a sort. But it could still prove fatal to many if it continues. The material is… mysterious. It absorbs electrical power and can give out electrical shocks, as well as containing something…”

“Unheimlich,” Kurt says. “Bad for people who are alive,” says Peter, who has joined us on the porch, adding to the feel of—what? normalcy? He brushes past me and I feel… glad he’s here; happy to work with him; not disappointed, barely even interested in his body any more. Not so long ago I was so crushed out on him so recently, so ready to give him everything, and now… not so much. Not at all, I tell myself.

Anyway, not now. We have a world, or at least a Westchester County, to save from malevolent non-weather.

If we’re going to save the world, we should do it now. Whatever is here comes from far, far away, it’s not magical, it’s not natural, it’s apparently out to get mutants who live here, and it’s won’t leave us alone for long. 

Something comes out of the foul rain and tries to zap Wolverine. It’s like a lightning rod in reverse. Without his powers he’d be burnt crispy. (Stop joking, Kitty. Does being a real superhero mean making morbid jokes?) The grey spikes or evil raindrops or something appear to be sticking together, and zooming horizontally towards each other, coalescing. This is not good.

We also have help, whether we want it or not. Lockheed—where were you, little dragon?—has been trying to fly in circles, but of course you can’t zap raindrops, and there’s something about this weather that’s weighing him down, turning his hide duller, discouraging him, and he’s not a dragon easily discouraged. Something about the rain is apparently scratching him, where the thick drops hit his skin: like fingernail marks, or pencil-graphite scars. He’s fluttering inside for shelter now. Very not good. He perches, briefly, on my shoulder, then ascends, back indoors.

Roberto has somehow popped up on the roof, and tries—he’s so brave, so, so young, so ridiculous on occasion—to leap into the grim rain using his powers, but he’s not doing much better than my favorite dragon: he has barely charged his powers, because he used most of what he’s got in the Danger Room yesterday (I was at the controls; not my favorite set) and he just got out of bed and there is no sunlight to be had for miles around. He has just enough Sunspot strength to turn what would have been a nasty fall into a harmless thud. Can you blush red while you glow solid black? He could if anyone could.

And behind him, behind Illyana, another New Mutant. And then I see what we’re dealing with, and why it scares us.

It’s Warlock. (I wish Doug were here.) He’s vibrating like piano wire hit with a sledgehammer, he’s throwing off sparks, he’s contracting from humanoid form into something more like… a microwave oven? a toaster? He turns into a kind of Etch-a-Sketch, revealing a terrified Warlock face and then a grim one with a horizontal mouth-grille, then static, then a toaster again.

I pick up the toaster/ Warlock. “You’re scared,” I say. “I think I know why.”

“Selfriend Katherine knowsdoesn’tknow Warlockdistresssource!” the toaster says. Something like a spring pops out of the front. “Warlockflightsonmurderfather discorporate foundagain separate into millipieces of millimagus, nanomaguses, fall on Earth to claim!”

The raindrops aren’t rain, they’re not magic, and they’re not exactly a weapon; they are tiny pieces of Warlock’s malevolent robot dad, Magus, who periodically comes to Earth to try to take his son back so that they can fight to the death over who gets their part of the planet, because that’s what his robot people do—they settle everything through combat and believe in nothing, no generosity, not much learning, no tenderness, just high-tech fights. That’s what made Warlock himself a refugee. The X-Men welcome refugees.

We don’t welcome grouchy malevolent real-estate overlords. Not even if they’re made of advanced semiconductor tech and would look cool in movies.

Magus knows we have ways to detect and repel him if he comes back here as himself (the Avengers are on it too). He’s gotten around them by coming back in thousands of tiny undetectable parts, which are now coming together to… zap us, maybe kill us, and kidnap our friend. Each part of the “rain” has a little bit of Warlock’s race’s techno-organic virus; get “wet” enough and you’ll turn into a machine whose life-force Magus, or Magus-bits, drain. It affected Lockheed first because he’s a lot smaller than an adult, or a teenaged, human being. But if this keeps up, it will “drown” us all.

The Magus-rain appears to be advancing on us. Some of the “raindrops” are growing a fiery face.

“Wolverine! Get out of the way!” I shout. “Illyana! Get out of the way!”

My best friend looks frightened. She should be.

I can’t be “Peter! Fastball special!” I call. “But for me! Throw me as high as you can into the air, and get ready to catch!”

He looks confused, but my ex-boyfriend is nothing if not a good listener. I use my dance technique to make myself small, jump into his arms, and let him treat me the way he usually treats Logan, hurling me almost vertically up, up through the malevolent precipitation… and when I’m at the top of the arc, I phase.

When I’m in my fully corporeal state, I sometimes fix electronics. When I’m immaterial, though, I disrupt them. I can walk through a mainframe and turn it to scrap metal; I can turn a cathode ray tube into a plain old tube. And I can turn pieces of a powerfully malevolent cyborg from space—as long as he’s based on electron flow through metals, on resistance and voltage and semiconductors—into a pile of nails and aluminum foil.

The problem is that I’m going to have to do it over and over. I’ve neutralized dozens of pieces of Magus as I fall, but I’m still falling, and falling far from the school. I can’t fly; if I stay phased when I fall I’ll have a tough time climbing out of solid earth. But if I turn solid, whomp: flattened Kitty.

Fortunately Kurt has noticed the dilemma. I smell sulfur, turn solid, and let him save me.

“Peter,” I say. “Do it again.”

He frowns, looks at the quivering, sparking toaster that is Warlock—the toaster’s eyes are blinking, very wide—and then looks out at the drive, the road, the mailbox, and the pieces that are corroding them, must be corroding schools and synagogues and houses for miles around.

I leap into Colossus’s arms, he tosses me into the rain again, and I phase, and I neutralize more of it. Kurt catches me—bamf!—and brings me back again. And then Peter tosses me hundreds of feet in the air…


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Like dancing while coding while lacing up ice-skates while falling, over and over, through the air.

It’s exhausting. It’s also necessary; there’s really no other way to avoid letting hundreds or thousands of malevolent, almost parodically patriarchal micro-robots kill off a big slice of Westchester and/or come together to kidnap one of our very best and most vulnerable selffriends (as he’s say).

Some of the Magus-bits short out and turn into scrap metal simply because I pass through them. Others require me to concentrate on the circuit designs; a resistor there, a crystal here, I pass through them in the right way, and they’re so much beach sand. But I have to move my body in just the right way. 

Meanwhile the bits are falling, flying, swarming, and trying to zap me back. It’s like doing Olympic gymnastics while also doing math homework while also trying to lace and unlace ice skates, over and over. While falling, hundreds of feet in the air.

What I see when I land helps. Warlock has become slightly bigger, which means he’s less afraid: he’s R2D2, a fire hydrant, an umbrella covered with circuit lines and blinking LEDs. He appears to be cheering me on. No, he has turned himself into—a wire safety net? A trampoline made of aluminum and circuit boards? It’s nice to have friends who try to keep you safe. I’d rather have Kurt keep catching me though.

Toss, phase, neutralize the robots, bamf, back to ground, toss again. Eight times. Ten times. It’s getting harder to know where I am. The dance lessons help: if I can pirouette again and again I can maybe finish this job without falling down. Or throwing up.

Aerial maneuvers in the Danger Room also helped, obviously. That’s aerial, not Ariel. That’s not my name anymore. (It beat “Sprite,” though.)

Twelve times. The sky appears to have cleared up; there are no longer metal bits falling from it. Ororo is up there now using the wind to clear the airborne, harmless, deactiviated debris.

Thirteen times. Kurt seems to have trouble catching me. Am I still solid?

Fourteen times. When Peter throws me back up into the air, it’s like I’m tissue paper, or cotton candy, unraveling. Up, neutralize, drift back down, get caught—bamf!—then picked up and thrown.

Fifteen. Sixteen. We’re done. The sky is clear. Warlock is out of danger; the mini-Magus bits are so many bits of scrap metal. Warlock celebrates by resuming bipedal form. “Nodanger nocomingtogether fatherbits KittyPeterKurt thankthanks!”

I am trying to nod and smile back but it’s hard: I don’t seem to be in control of my face. I’m too light; I’m lightheaded, from exertion, of course, but I can’t seem to breathe, or catch my breath, or even sit down… help?

All that phasing and unphasing seems to have left me stuck half-immaterial. With hideous inappropriateness I think of that inescapable song, all over radios last year: we are living in a material world, and I am an immaterial girl.

Can I even get from place to place? Peter has put me down and I don’t want him to pick me up again. I wouldn’t mind advice, or reassurance, or even a strictly-speaking-irrelevant display of confident leadership, from Ororo, who is apparently still up there in the to-be-welcomed sunshine, using the wind to build up and grind down ex-Magus bits into piles of metal filings. I’d love to see Lockheed—and there he is, zipping around me!—but it doesn’t help. I’m still see-through, still coming apart.

I know who I want to see. And there she is.

My best friend in this world (also in other worlds) stands next to me and catches me by the fingertips—it’s like taking a soggy piece of paper, or a jellyfish, out of the ocean waves, except that I am the jellyfish; I am just barely tangible, and my hands are hard for me to see until she leads me back into the shade, indoors.

But she does seem able to lead me, to move me indoors, down the broad central hallway, into the back, past the labs and the classrooms, up two flights of stairs. Whatever ability I have to move through the world at the moment, to have something close to a solid—albeit a shimmery, half-there, very tired body—comes because my best friend is holding my hand, holding me up, holding me very close.

I thought I saw a bit of her armor materialize on her shoulder, but I put my head down on that same shoulder, leaning on her as she brings me up from the last stairs’ landing, and she’s warm beneath fabric again, flesh and shoulder blade, nothing metallic, nothing mystic, not here, now now.

“You beat the robots,” Illyana says. “You didn’t even have to trash the place.” She kisses my ephemeral nose. It’s cute and awkward: her lips go right through me. “Let’s see what we can do to get you solid again.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magik solves Kitty's most substantial problem.

Time to take stock, step back, see the whole scene. Magik has just carried, or dragged, or gently shrugged, Kitty Pryde up the stairs to their shared bedroom. Illyana’s no longer showing her soul-armor, which is a good sign: no risk of intrusion from Limbo, and no magical menace, just a techno-xenobiological one that Kitty has finally, exhaustingly, dispelled. And she’s exhausted in a way that baseline humans, and other mutants, can’t get exhausted: she’s almost without a physical form, an apparition or a hologram, having phased so hard so often through so many bits of alien tech that she’s given up almost all (but not all!) her embodiment in her attempt to save Warlock, and the New Mutants, and the X-Men, and Westchester County, and possibly the rest of North America, from the marauding, potentially filicidal, violently patriarchal Technarch called Magus. 

How did that feel—like being run through by a really mean kid’s model airplanes? like almost being stapled to death, and surviving?—in any case Kitty is having a very hard time feeling anything at all right now: her toes are passing through the wood of the floorboards, her left hand goes right through the bannister, and her right hand is tangled up around and inside her best friend’s loose red cotton sleeve and inside her elbow. She’s looking at Illyana as they enter their attic bedroom, thinking, and almost mouthing, Don’t let me drift away.

Illyana has been thinking that Kitty needs rest, needs space, needs time to herself, time to contemplate, time to heal naturally: that Kitty needs what Illyana would need were she physically (this happens all the time) or emotionally (but she will not let this happen to her; she won’t let herself get this vulnerable) exhausted. She has been thinking that Kitty needs what many a non-mutant girl would need: an early bedtime, a few hours with a good book (there’s a new volume of the collected Elfquest out this week, which Illyana has been saving as a surprise: Kitty likes Elfquest so much she wears the T-shirt to bed), and after that, eleven hours of sleep.

Illyana realizes her thoughts were wrong. She tries to lead the exhausted, not-quite-solid Katherine Pryde back to her bed, to tuck her in—it’s a stingingly tender reversal of Kitty’s own fears for herself, and her tingly feelings, so early this morning, and a reversal, too, of the days years and years ago (but only a year, for Kitty!) when Illyana was a little girl whom Kitty protected and told fairy stories. Now they’re best friends, they’re responsible for each other, and Illyana wants to be nothing if not responsible, but when she starts to let go of Kitty’s hand her friend starts to drift away, not only in her mind—her eyes lose focus—but in her body; she’s cotton, she’s froth, she’s a mist, she’s not going to stay in bed, if Illyana lets go. She may not stay alive, unless they stay close.

So Magik decides to find out how close they can go. “Come with me,” she says. “You don’t have to disappear. You can stay with me. We can stay here.”

In a few minutes they are in bed together again, like this morning, but together in a brand-new way; not one curled around the other, like spoons, like this morning, when the menace that turned into Magus showed up in the sky. 

Instead, Illyana has thrown off her Russian quilt with its dense embroidered petals, she has thrown off her stiff white oversheet, she has thrown off her own black tights and familiar, thick yellow-and-black top, and rather than changing into sweats or a nightgown she has lain down deliberately on her own bed, in just bra and underwear (both are white and shiny, with gold stripes). 

Then just as slowly, just as deliberately, as if she were planting a delicate root in thin soil, as if she were wrapping a gift in the thinnest paper, she has brought Kitty’s body down on top of her, so that the curly-haired, skinny Jewish American and the solid, muscular, white-blond Russian occupy the same physical space: they are not only in bed together, but juxtaposed, shoulder on shoulder, head over head.

If Illyana let go of Kitty right now, just ignored her, she’d drift into nothingness, up into space, never to be a person again. If Kitty turned entirely solid right away, she’d kill them both instaneously. What Illyana believes—and Kitty believes it too; she’s nodding, faintly—is that this kind of physical togetherness will bring Kitty back gradually to her physical self.

They lie very still and say nothing. Kitty nods again. She’s rolling over, still insubstantial, still overlapping with her friend’s solid body. Another kind of togetherness seems called for. 

Magik’s heart is beating slightly faster. Is Kitty’s? It’s so quiet up there that Illyana thinks that she can tell. But if Kitty can speak, they’re inaudible whispers. Something about holding? or keeping? or going? 

Magik crosses her arms over her breasts, then moves one of them sideways, still holding Kitty’s hand, and then moves the other arm until Illyana’s hand is between Illyana’s own thighs. She presses her thighs together—Kitty’s spectral thighs move, too—and then moves them apart, and starts to stroke herself between her legs, which is to say between Kitty’s legs, which is to say between herself and Kitty… they’re in that warm place together, and Kitty can start to feel Illyana’s smooth skin heating up as her breath gets faster and shorter, then slower, then faster again.

They’ve done this, or something like this, together before, but it’s not something they talk about much; neither girl had realized how important it could be, nor had they decided what to call it, this thing they had done, together, in bed, sometimes. It fit them. It made more sense, infinitely more sense, than touching yourself alone, or not touching yourself, or wanting to touch your friend but never admitting it…

And now? This is love; it feels like time to admit it. Whatever its future, whatever its other names, whatever it means for tomorrow, this is love.

It’s also hot. Literally hot: Kitty is touching herself too now, she’s touching her friend between her legs, she’s looking down at her best friend’s body, floating slightly above that body, as the not-quite-solid Kitty turns over from back to face-down and then rises above Illyana, slowly becoming physically separate; there’s steam in the air between them, the energy given off—it must have been an exothermic reaction, Kitty thinks—from Kitty’s solidification. 

Just like me, Kitty then thinks, to consider the chemistry; and then she’s absorbed again in chemistry of another sort, contemplating the strength in Illyana’s pale shoulders, the filled-out globes of her breasts under the smooth striped bra cups, the way their eyes meet. Kitty’s head comes to rest above her best friend’s shoulder; Kitty’s curls splay across Illyana’s clavicle and under her shoulder blade.

They kiss. Something about the excitement they’ve experienced together has brought Kitty almost all the way back to solid life, she realizes as she drifts—literally drifts—back down beside Illyana in that narrow bed, as Illyana’s eyes close, and the girls’ hands are together in that same miraculous place. Her legs open again…

A long time after that—really, maybe, an hour—Illyana kisses her friend awake, grabs what Kitty would have to call her butt, or maybe her gluteus maximus, and squeezes until her friend rolls over. Then it’s time for the young women to explore, together, what’s between Kitty’s legs, what sensitive harmonies they can play together (tickling, applying gentle pressure) on Kitty’s ribs, across Kitty’s still-maybe-forever-pretty-flat chest, and if Kitty turns semi-transparent, slightly steamy, wide-eyed, then solid again, it’s because she wants to: she’s at home in their room, in her body, and right now she’s really there, all of her is entirely there, just where she wants to be.

A few hours after that there’s something else hot and comfortable that wakes them both up together, though Magik goes right back to sleep: a few sparks in the air from a pint-size lavender dragon, hovering peacefully, waiting for the lovers to face the lessons of the day together, right by Kitty’s head.


End file.
